Hate gallery

Now, it's not often that we get grumpy about things. Particularly things that encourage museum visits, invite people to express their opinions and generally big up the arts. These seem, so far as we're qualified to say, A Good Thing.

But there's something about the announcement by BBC Radio 4's Today programme that it has just launched a nationwide poll for "The Greatest Painting in Britain" that makes us knit our brows and scowl fiercely into our mugs of morning tea. What's got us riled?

Is it that the prospect of yet another top-10-style cultural face-off makes us feel a bit dizzy? The idea that the 6.5 million people who regularly listen to Today can be said to speak for the "nation"? The inevitable celebrity involvement? (Boris Johnson has already appeared to trumpet the satirical panache of Hogarth.) Or just the fact that the whole wheeze seems stuffed with silly-season pointlessness? No, not quite – although we could get quite grumpy about all that.

Frankly, we're not convinced that asking for a list of favourite paintings is really that much fun. Niceness is boring, we reckon. So we want to know which paintings you hate. Really, really loathe. Can't stand. Want to maim. Burn. Yes, that's right. The search is now on for Most Overrated Painting Ever!

Informal – and, of course, highly irregular – polling around the GU arts watercooler reveals that Constable's The Hay Wain is an early, if predictable, front-runner. So too are Dalí's The Persistence of Memory, El Greco's Baptism of Christ, Claude Lorrain's Landscape with a Goatherd and Goats and - perhaps more controversially - Vermeer's Allegory of Faith. Someone else suggested the Mona Lisa. Someone else "all those Monet ones with sequences of haystacks ... really dull". We could go on.